A Taste of Mario Batali’s Tarry Market

For handmade pasta and fine meats and cheeses in Port Chester, NY, Tarry Market is the place. By the time we got to Mario Batali’s charming shop, around 2 p.m., they were out of the fresh pastries we’d come for. I settled for a chocolate chip walnut cookie and bought some apricot jam for my mom.

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Why were we late to the market? Too busy chomping on burgers at Burgers, Shakes & Fries. Mine had a fried egg, mushrooms and hot peppers. The bread was soft yet crispy and scraped at the roof of my mouth. It barely held together as the burger was devoured.

Eating at Burgers, Shakes & Fries in Port Chester

Cupcakes in Connecticut

Crumbs Bake Shop in Greenwich, Conn. There is no equal.

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Packing for the East Coast in April

Sajan already knew the shorts he wanted to pack for New York. I had summer dresses and shorts in mind myself. Then we checked the weather.

55 degrees. In April??? Ugh.

OK, so shorts (or a dress) and a light jacket then, right?

Wrong.

The East Coast wind whipped at our faces mercilessly. I borrowed bubble jackets from gracious friends and layered on clothes.

When we came back to Houston, I threw off my layers and kissed the sunlight for its warm, windless April touch.

Another year, another garden

Toward the end of March, we finally got to work on our garden. And by we, I mean Sajan, his parents and my mom. I did some planting and directing, but they did all the grunt work. Our yards were a complete mess of dead stuff from the winter and fast-growing weeds from a few weeks of spring.

Sajan rented a little trailer he filled with a yard of mulch and a yard of soil. I went with our moms to Houston Garden Center for the plants. There was weed-pulling, old-plant trashing or trimming, dirt-spreading, digging and mulch-spreading. Below are snapshots of both the front and back.

Do You Consider Yourself a Creative? (How Painting Day Was Born)

HT: @avinash

It started in a warehouse just north of downtown Houston, where real live artists holed themselves up to practice their craft. Behind the doors of each artist space, nuts and bolts and paints and steel and chemical smells lay everywhere.

Sandwich Night

The finished product, sometimes pressed in the sandwich grill.

Sandwich night is a treasured ritual among our friends. It started as an impromptu gathering one evening at our friends Bibby and Kavitha’s house when everyone brought a different fine sandwich ingredient — bread, meat, cheese, spread and the like.

Today the guest list has expanded, and the meats, breads, cheeses and spreads are even more exquisite. These fotos are from our last meetup mid-February.

The sandwiches are an excuse to laugh with friends and enjoy the simpler things in life.

 

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Advice for 2011: Fight Inertia & Break a Window

Want to get your new year started off right? Read my GenJuice post Throw Your New Year’s Resolutions Out the Window for four steps to rock star success.

More new year’s tips from the Red Sea archives:

Fight Inertia: 5 Tips
How high are you setting the bar?

Fight Inertia: 5 More Tips
Figure out how to succeed at anything.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rozabbotts/3531365977/

Camera Nerds, Rejoice: DSLRs for Your Pocket

Time to put your old, bulky cameras away

If you like cheesy videos, you’ll love this one. It’s a 2-minute review of the latest near-DSLR quality cameras with pocket-size bodies that won’t leave you looking like a tourist.

Watch the video review now.

I hesitated for years in buying a digital SLR camera because face it — who wants to lug one of those things around everywhere? A small point-and-shoot Canon can take decent pictures much of the time.

Until you’re in low-light locations, around moving people or want the ability to fine-tune your camera settings.

Thank goodness for these new premium compact cameras.

Canon S95: F/2.0 lens lets in more light. Use “Wink” shot to take a timerless self-portrait.
Panasonic Lumix LX5: F/2.0 lens, big sensor, fast.
Samsung TL500: can zoom while you film video, wider lens, LCD swings around for more shooting options.

The sensor on these cameras isn’t as big as a DSLR, but it’s 50 percent bigger than a point-and-shoot. You can’t beat the quality and control of a DSLR, but if you want to take casual, quality photos on the go, here’s your answer.

Price point: $400s

Photo credits: captkodak & sarabeephoto

Design is Communication is Design

Fiona Morrison is behind much of JetBlue’s award-winning branding and design sensibilities. Read more about her work in Fast Company. Laugh out loud at her video campaign (below) to put the humanity back in flying.

How Kiran Bedi Took Back Her Life Story

Kiran Bedi was born in a time that didn’t belong to girls, she says. Her father almost lost his inheritance by making the bold move in the 1950s to educate Kiran and her three sisters. This foundation helped Kiran become a national tennis champ and a police chief who radically changed the prison system.

Her life almost sounds like a myth. She had every reason to believe she couldn’t succeed in a male-dominated world and couldn’t change behavior and mindsets in a broken prison system.

Two things Kiran’s parents taught her:

1. Life is on an incline. You either go up or you come down.
2. The 90/10 rule.

The 90/10 Rule

Kiran says 100 things will happen in your life, good or bad. Out of 100, 90 are your creation. If they’re good, you can enjoy them. If they’re bad, you can learn from them. The other 10 are out of your control — deaths, hurricanes and the like. You can control only the way you respond to them.

Making Something Out of Nothing (or 0+1=10)